Hope, Experience, and Iowa

Samuel Johnson once called a second marriage, “The triumph of hope over experience.” The same might be said of the Iowa caucuses.

Now the warriors of politics and their faithful media companions trek to New Hampshire. That and South Carolina will be sterner tests for Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee. Will they pass? Possibly. If Iowa is indicative of anything, Americans want something more than a new person in the White House. They want some new thing as well.

What is that thing? I’m not sure. Obama and Huckabee both draw very self-consciously on their religious roots; so it is reasonable to assume that a certain sincerity of faith is important. Or at least the ability to fake it.

Cynical, am I not? Not necessarily. The ability to fake something and the ability to project that same thing in sincerity over the media are perilously similar skills. Even the politician can lose track of the distinction and confuse his or her own acting with conviction.

Time and experience in observing candidates can help us separate the two (as well as let us know if that sincerity helps them in making good decisions). But we have had little time in the case of these two candidates to know just exactly how their faith and decision-making intersect.

So, in truth, those voters who see the faith of candidates as important have little to base their decisions on, other than faith itself.

Or is economics the key to finding that new thing?

It will be interesting to see if the new unemployment numbers affect the first primaries. Obama’s domestic policy is not that different from his rivals; so any shift away from Obama will suggest either that Hillary Clinton’s argument that experience should trump ”false hopes” is having an impact. Or it may indicate that John Edwards “two Americas” rhetoric is gaining some traction.

The impact of the unemployment news on the Republicans seems even less predictable to me. As the same article that I linked for Edwards indicates, immigration is becoming the focus for many Republicans who fear the new economic trends. That would tend to weaken the prospects for Huckabee’s unorthodox (for Republicans) approach to economic problems. However, immigration was supposed to be the most important issue to Iowa Republicans; so maybe I am wrong about that.

Quite honestly, I’m not sure which Republican (if any) has this issue cornered. Even Ron Paul has adopted an anti-immigration stand that has saddened some of his strongest libertarian supporters (though they are still sticking with him). If John McCain does not catch fire next week despite the weakening of Mitt Romney’s candidacy, it could well be his stand on immigration that killed his candidacy.

Probably, of course, there is no one new “thing” that people want. And the only uniting passion in the electorate is for something different from what they have now. Seeing those different hopes clash and evolve will be fascinating to observe, but more than a bit scary to experience.

So let us hope, as the primary season finally begins, that just as good second marriages occur despite the odds, so will hope triumph in our public lives as well.